Culture Blogs

Many are those that focus on female divinities, leaving male divinities in the shadows if they get mentioned at all. This is a shame. Here I will share my thoughts, stories and prayers on male divinities. Currently focusing on divinities placed in an atheist "graveyard".

Tiamat's Fate

The tale of Tiamat could be seen as a creation story. It could be seen as patriarchy overwhelming matriarchy. If there are those that honor this creatrix, this goddess of chaos, I did not find them. I did however find a tale of her fate. A tale of a wounded heart: first by the patriarch’s threat to her children, then by the death of her consort before a final death claimed her. Yet if she lives on in memory, is she truly dead? I don't know. Mayhap, her inclusion in the god “graveyard” was deserved though not in the fashion the atheists intended.

Tiamat’s fate

In the beginning neither heaven nor earth only Apsu and Tiamat he of fresh and she of salt waters nothing marred their realms no land, no turbulence then Tiamat birthed two followed by two more who birthed their own in time, Ea was born the clever god of rivers ruling over even his forbearers

Loud and unruly descendents make for a tired god marring his sleep and calm his solution was a bloody one angrily refused by Tiamat hurt and horrified over the threat Apsu proceeded in spite only to be discovered slain by magic of Ea adding that realm to his own

Jealous relatives report to the widowed salty goddess whose monstrous army marches vengeance for her lover’s death Ea, fearful and uncertain calls upon his son, Marduk to defend father and kingdom Marduk's condition for that honor his is the kingdom upon victory all agree, gifting robes and scepter

Armed with thunder and storms Marduk defeated her monsters alone Tiamat faces her grandchild howling for his blood, for vengeance only to be slain by storm wind and arrow heart wounded a third and final time Marduk was not done with this ancestor with a club he split her like a clam half forming the heavens the remaining became land placed forever over her lover’s waters

So much has changed for me in the last year. I'm an eclectic polytheist whose main divinities are Heru-ur, Isis, Zeus, Hermes and Hestia. I'm a mother, wife and Librarian living in the Rocky Mountains stumbling on my path and wondering what the heck I'm doing. Blessed be.

Comments

Fritz Muntean
Sunday, 12 January 2014

In the Enuma Elish, a Sumerian creation myth of the 13th to 11th century BCE, the chaotic state of the world -- before Creation took place and the world took on a recognizable form -- is represented by a monstrous deity named Tiamat. Many of today's Pagans have come to think of Tiamat as a benign and nurturing deity: a kind of watery Mother Goddess. But Tiamat is not really a 'goddess', at least not in the sense we commonly use the term.

A misunderstanding occurs whenever English-speaking people take too personally the apparent genders of the ancient deities. Classical languages (and indeed almost all modern languages) arbitrarily assign a nominal gender to all nouns, a practice that modern English retains in a vestigial form only in third-person singular personal pronouns. So if the Greek world for victory, nike, is (arbitrarily) designated as 'feminine', then the divinity representing victory, Nike, becomes (arbitrarily) a Goddess. In most cases, nothing more personal or concrete, as far as gender, is implied.

It may be true that nouns were originally assigned gender for some reason. But a very large number of nouns have different genders in Greek and Latin, in French and German, so these reasons must vary wildly from culture to culture and are, at any rate, lost in the mists of time.

It is of some interest to note that in the Canaanite creation myth that parallels the Sumerian, the word for the Chaotic (acreative) Power of the Sea is 'Mot'. The languages are closely related, as are the words themselves, but Mot is masculine in Canaanite, and therefore a God. The ensuing battle is engaged by Baal, the Canaanite rain God, in company with his fierce warrior sister/consort Anath, an erotic, blood-thirsty, Kali type of Goddess related to the Sumerian Inanna and the Akkadian Ishtar, who later developed into the Philistine Astarte and the Punic Tannit. The Canaanite word for Sun, by the way, is feminine, and so the Canaanites had -- you guessed it -- a Sun Goddess.

So if the Sumerian word for the kind of chaos represented by the storm- and tide-driven waters of the Persian Gulf happens to be feminine, and the Sumerian word for the ordering powers of the wind that dries up these chaotic waters and allows agriculture and civilization to develop happens to be masculine, then only an ungenerous (paranoid, and typically English-speaking) person would consider such a myth to be an attack by 'the patriarchy' the kind of concrete femininity that resides in human womankind.

Furthermore, to worship this force of blind chaos as a kind of saintly martyr to ancient patriarchal oppression is to invoke into the world all the primitive destructive powers of Tiamat. In the light of these concerns, let us just be thankful that Chthulu isn't a feminine noun in some ancient language.

If anyone feels that they absolutely have to worship a really truly scary warrior Goddess, try Anath instead, but do read part 2 of the 14th century BCE Ugaritic text entitled 'Concerning Baal'. Especially the part that begins (in the Coogan translation) "The gates of Anath's house were shut . . ."